Mining vs cooling

[Some Kerbal]

Hello sports fans.

Managed to get a station up around Minmus and garnered enough science to open up the mining equipment. Decided to give that a go.

Russled up a ship with two large drills and the Convert-o-tron 250 and plopped it onto Minmus. I have 4 medium cooling arrays and a level 2 engineer and I cannot seem to keep things cool enough. So the question is, what is the recommended amount of cooling per drill and per convert-o-tron? I have browsed through the various tutorials on mining but I was not able to glean an answer.

Based on the numbers in the tool tips, the convert-o-tron required 200kW of cooling, max of 500kW. The drills require 100kW of cooling each, max of 100kW. That puts my cooling needs at 400kW (for this ship) at a minimum and 700kW for max performance. 

The numbers in the tool tip for the radiators are a bit confusing. The mediums Core Heat Transfer - 250kW. Max Cooling 19494kW. Transfer rate of 10%. Cools up to 4x part temp.

With 4 medium radiators I read that I should have 1000kW of cooling capability, which should be enough, but since it is not I am clearly not understanding something.

Please point me to the right tutorial or tell me how these numbers work.

Thanks in advance

[bewing]

I think you are seeing a known bug from your description. If you run a drill and a converter at the same time, and you use retractable radiators, then the converter will overheat and the drills will not. Your calculations are precisely correct -- the equipment is generating 400kW of core heat, and your radiators should be able to dissipate 1MW, and the equipment can accept 700kW of that 1MW of cooling. But it doesn't quite work.

So, to break it down a little further: having the converter overheat is mostly just cosmetic. Anywhere except an asteroid, the converter can convert far faster than the drills can produce -- even when overheated. So just let it overheat -- it can't blow up or anything. If you really want to avoid the condition, then shut down the drills momentarily while you run the converter.

 

[Some Kerbal]

I tried running the two drills without the converter, and then just a single drill. In each condition, the drill overheated and shut down before I got 10 ore in the tank.

With all four medium panels out, the drill tool tip says it's thermal efficiency is 5% and the thermal panels tool tip says they are cooling at 9.3% ( and this 9.3% is dependent on where the sun is; if it is low in the sky the cooling rate is higher(14%) than when the sun is directly overhead. In darkness, the rate is 6.3%).

Even with those numbers I should not be overheating a drill. If the drill is putting out 100kW of heat and the four panels are running at 9.6% of the 1000kW, I should be dropping 96kW of heat.

Do the thermal units need to be attached directly to the drills? Is there some sort of distance limit from heat generator to thermal units that affects efficiency?

[Aegolius13]

2 hours ago, Some Kerbal said:

Do the thermal units need to be attached directly to the drills? Is there some sort of distance limit from heat generator to thermal units that affects efficiency?

The retractable radiators are supposed to be able to cool from anywhere on the ship - I've not heard that there's any penalty based on distance or anything like that.  The static radiators, however, are restricted - there can only be one part between them and the part you want to cool.  

I've never really gotten the heat math, so I built a test rig with mining equipment and a whole bunch of different radiator options, then started mining and turned the radiators on one at a time to see what I needed to maintain equilibrium.  This is even easier if you use the debug menu to move to Mun/Minmus orbit.  

I used to exclusively use the retractable radiators, but have now gravitated towards static.  One large panel can cool two large drills, and two large panels can cool one ISRU.  So it only takes four panels total for my standard four drill rig.  And they're lighter, use less electricity, and are much less prone to breakage than the retractable option.  However, depending on your design, finding a good spot to put them may be tricky.  

 

[bewing]

3 hours ago, Some Kerbal said:

I tried running the two drills without the converter, and then just a single drill. In each condition, the drill overheated and shut down before I got 10 ore in the tank.

With all four medium panels out, the drill tool tip says it's thermal efficiency is 5% and the thermal panels tool tip says they are cooling at 9.3% ( and this 9.3% is dependent on where the sun is; if it is low in the sky the cooling rate is higher(14%) than when the sun is directly overhead. In darkness, the rate is 6.3%).

Even with those numbers I should not be overheating a drill. If the drill is putting out 100kW of heat and the four panels are running at 9.6% of the 1000kW, I should be dropping 96kW of heat.

Do the thermal units need to be attached directly to the drills? Is there some sort of distance limit from heat generator to thermal units that affects efficiency?

Something is going wrong for you then. What you are describing sounds impossible. Are you running any mods? They often mess up the resource extraction logic.

Please post a craft file that I can test to see if I can replicate your problem. Exactly which version of KSP are you running?

 

[Srpadget]

It takes quite a while for drills/converters to "warm up", and they perform poorly if they're too cold OR if they're too hot.  Are you sure they're running at 5% because they're OVERheated, or might it be because they're UNDERheated?  The core temperature and ideal temperature are both found on the part's right-click context menu--though you may have to turn that feature on in the debug menu (Alt-F12, Physics, Thermal; click the ?top? button on that screen, which is labeled something very close to "Show thermal data on context menus").

Core temp is near the top of the menu, and has two numbers:  the first is current temperature, the second is ideal temperature.

So if the drill's core temp reads something like "286K/500k" and the first number is climbing, you're fine--just hit a couple levels of timewarp and wait for the drill to finish warming up.  If the drill's core temp reading is something like "598K/500K" and the first number is climbing, that's a sign of overheat.  And as others have said, you shouldn't be having problems with overheat using that setup.  I've been using a 2 drill, 1 converter, 4 medium TCS mining rig quite similar to yours since V1.0.5 and it still works fine in V1.2.1.

[foamyesque]

3 hours ago, Aegolius13 said:

The retractable radiators are supposed to be able to cool from anywhere on the ship - I've not heard that there's any penalty based on distance or anything like that.  The static radiators, however, are restricted - there can only be one part between them and the part you want to cool.  

I've never really gotten the heat math, so I built a test rig with mining equipment and a whole bunch of different radiator options, then started mining and turned the radiators on one at a time to see what I needed to maintain equilibrium.  This is even easier if you use the debug menu to move to Mun/Minmus orbit.  

I used to exclusively use the retractable radiators, but have now gravitated towards static.  One large panel can cool two large drills, and two large panels can cool one ISRU.  So it only takes four panels total for my standard four drill rig.  And they're lighter, use less electricity, and are much less prone to breakage than the retractable option.  However, depending on your design, finding a good spot to put them may be tricky.  

 

I've found you can actually cool three drills and an ISRU on two of the large fixed radiators if you've got them placed correctly. The ISRU will overheat slightly for a little while because the drills hit operating temperature first and (with a 5-star engineer aboard) will actually exceed the ISRU's conversion rate for a little while, resulting in surplus ore. The ISRU, as it thermals up, will then start eating the surplus ore and generate heat faster than the radiators dissipate it until the surplus is gone and the system settles back into equilibrium. But once it's there, it can operate indefinitely.

[Some Kerbal]

On 12/3/2016 at 11:38 PM, Srpadget said:

It takes quite a while for drills/converters to "warm up", and they perform poorly if they're too cold OR if they're too hot.  Are you sure they're running at 5% because they're OVERheated, or might it be because they're UNDERheated?  The core temperature and ideal temperature are both found on the part's right-click context menu--though you may have to turn that feature on in the debug menu (Alt-F12, Physics, Thermal; click the ?top? button on that screen, which is labeled something very close to "Show thermal data on context menus").

Core temp is near the top of the menu, and has two numbers:  the first is current temperature, the second is ideal temperature.

So if the drill's core temp reads something like "286K/500k" and the first number is climbing, you're fine--just hit a couple levels of timewarp and wait for the drill to finish warming up.  If the drill's core temp reading is something like "598K/500K" and the first number is climbing, that's a sign of overheat.  And as others have said, you shouldn't be having problems with overheat using that setup.  I've been using a 2 drill, 1 converter, 4 medium TCS mining rig quite similar to yours since V1.0.5 and it still works fine in V1.2.1.

This. As this was my first time doing any mining I was not understanding the mechanics of what the tooltip numbers were telling me. The corp temp numbers were climbing no matter how much cooling I had and that was confusing me. Once the warm up was completed everything wired the way it was supposed to. I just never saw any mention of this in any of the tutorials I watched so I was confused. 

Course now I have a mining rig with two large drills and four gigantic cooling arrays as a by product of trying to figure this out. But hey, I learned.